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Why 30 is the new 20

Not so long ago, adulthood was thought to begin in the 20s. But now that decade is seen as a kind of limbo. Meet the millennial ‘twixter'

Writer Jack Kerouac (TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

By Sarah BarmakSpecial to the Star

Fri., Sept. 3, 2010

Hamlet, Shakespeare's troubled prince of Denmark, is among the most unfocused heroes in literature. Faced with evidence of his father's murder by his uncle, he hems and haws over whether to avenge the death, pursue his girlfriend Ophelia, or just hang out with his buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Today, Hamlet would likely fit in among his fellow twentysomethings. According to new psychological research, today's youth are delaying big milestones such as marriage, career and children later than ever. They're spending more time completing the advanced degrees demanded by today's competitive economy, moving back in with mom and dad to afford tuition, working at unpaid internships — and pondering their next move.

This has caught the attention of a small but increasingly influential group of psychology experts who say we should consider the period between the age of 18 and the late 20s as a new life stage called “emerging adulthood.” It would be characterized by five features, according to Clark University psychologist Jeffery Arnett: identity exploration, instability, feeling in-between, a sense of possibilities and self-focus.

The designation would reflect changing expectations of the “twixter” cohort — so named because they're caught between adolescence and adulthood. For today's emerging adults, putting off a commitment to a spouse, a single career and children for longer is a way to weigh their options, allowing them to choose their commitments perhaps more carefully and deliberately than they imagine their parents did.

As late as 1970, the median age of U.S. adults' first marriage hovered around the early twenties. By 2000, it had gone up to 27 for men and 25 for women.

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For others, critics say, this time lag has become a way to preserve freedom — freedom to travel or not, work or not, hook up or not — for no other reason than because they can. Having tasted what it feels like to have freedom from any demands more serious than working shifts at Starbucks, many twentysomethings are — understandably — loathe to leave it for mortgages, diaper changes and PTA meetings.

“It (is) a time of exploring your options, a time of freedom, a time of feeling that maybe choices are open to you, that doors have not yet closed,” says Texas Tech professor of human development Alan Reifman, who is working with Arnett to get the new life-stage recognized by other mental health practitioners.

A debate is under way about whether to redefine adulthood for the 21st century. In literature, however, this “twixter” state has been around for a while.

Long before emerging adulthood — or adolescence, for that matter — were distinct life stages, novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote about a man who fails to mature and commit to one woman in Sentimental Education. Marcel Proust chronicled his own period of delayed-onset adulthood in late-19th- century France in his novel In Search of Lost Time. His protagonist floats through his youth, “a time when, every day, I regarded myself as standing upon the threshold of a life which was still intact and would not enter upon its course until the following morning.”

If adolescence is our most rebellious and chaotic period — the punk rock of life-stages — emerging adulthood seems like the most literary. Psychologists' descriptions of it seem to echo many of the values expressed by the Romantic poets: a sense of possibility, open-endedness and freedom.

Kerouac's groundbreaking novel On the Road, which followed a group of young men who were closely based on Kerouac and his friends as they went on alcohol-fuelled hitchhiking trips across the United States.

If it once afflicted the heroes of the literary canon, emerging adulthood has resurfaced again in contemporary culture.

In the 2009 comedy Post Grad, Alexis Bledel plays a 20-something graduate who moves back in with her parents while she figures out what to do with her life. And 2006 rom-com Failure to Launch stars Matthew McConaughey as a 35-year-old slacker still living with his mother.

Considered a defining novel of a past generation of youth, On the Road is also now back in style. It is soon to be a film starring Viggo Mortensen, and is due to hit theatres next year.

There's no way to tell, however, whether the anti-establishment charms of riding in a flatbed truck, sharing bottles of whisky with homeless men and wondering where your next meal will come from will have the same charm for today's hyper-scheduled, wired, trust-fund youth.

Working at unpaid internships — yes. Begging for change — not so much.

The stage of exploring personal identity and retaining a sense of possibility can last into the 30s and beyond for some. In thirtysomething Toronto writer Sheila Heti's forthcoming novel How Should A Person Be?, she holds up real-life friends as models of different traits she admires and might want to adopt — the responsibility of one friend, the irresponsibility of another.

She wonders how to build her ideal soul, or whether deciding what kind of soul you have is even possible.

If this is the age of the “failure to launch” generation, not everyone is welcoming it with open arms. Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, which came out in Canada on Saturday, explores the negative potential of having too few restrictions, both moral and political. An idea behind the novel seems to be that freedom can liberate, but it can paralyze too.

And while advocates have argued that acceptance of this new life stage is much like the acceptance of adolescence as a stage in the 20th century, critics have charged that it only applies to those with the resources to delay adulthood.

In fact, groups such as the poor — who must forgo advanced education to work — teen parents and most of the residents of developing nations would seem to skip this “stage” altogether.

“If part of emerging adulthood is taking a year off travel the world trying to find yourself, if you're well-off and your parents are financially supporting to it's a lot easier to do that,” concedes Reifman, who says the phenomenon may only affect industrialized countries.

Franzen, 51, told Time that his literary life is dependent on constraint, not utter liberty.

“I came to realize that because my purpose on Earth seems to be to write novels, I am actually freer when I'm chained to a project: freer from guilt, anxiety, boredom, anger, purposelessness.”

That is the hard-nosed, responsible insight of a 51-year-old, however. For twentysomethings, their purpose on earth is something that remains to be determined — until their late 20s or early 30s cuts off the backpacking trips to Europe and brings RRSPs, mortgages and children.

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